


Sunlight

by Dansnotavampire



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: And were writing about john, John Comes Back, M/M, Mutual Pining, Not Beta Read, Pining, Probably some suicidal ideation, Running Away, Slow Burn, gay shit, its me, soft, soooo, this is a mess im sorry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-16
Updated: 2018-08-16
Packaged: 2019-06-28 11:16:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,191
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15706128
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dansnotavampire/pseuds/Dansnotavampire
Summary: Eventually, John sees the sun again.





	Sunlight

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by the song Party of One by Brandi Carlile. Go listen

John wakes up on an empty stretch of golden sand, the sun high in the sky - not the golden sunset of the Parley Room, not the inky black rainbow of the hunger, but clear, brilliant sunlight. Sunlight unlike anything he's seen in millennia. 

 

 

He stands up, slowly, and on unsteady legs, and then he walks. Away from the beach, away from the sea, away from the memories of… of everything. Of Merle. 

 

 

He walks to the town, just by the beach, far enough away that he's not strolling along the sand everyday, but close enough that all the fires of his false hopes stay lit. 

 

 

John discovers many things in those first few weeks of being alive. That he needs to eat, needs to sleep, needs to breathe. 

 

 

And, more surprisingly, he discovers that people can be kind. Kindness is new, for him. Of course, people know about him, the hunger, what he did, but - but no one seems to know him, his face. As a result, they are kind. 

 

 

He imagines that they wouldn't be if they knew who he was. 

 

 

He wanders into a cafe, one day. Sits at a table. Orders some coffee, and a brownie. Tips a teaspoon of sugar into his mug, and stirs. 

 

 

He doesn't look up when the door opens, and he misses when Merle walks in. Misses the look on his face when he sees John, sat at a table, hale and whole and alive. Misses him going to a table, and ordering a tea. Doesn't see him scrawling a note on a napkin and handing it to a waiter. 

 

 

Does see the waiter walking over to him, of course, with said note. It simply reads, in hurried, chicken-scratch handwriting, ‘Good to see you're safe, buddy.’ 

 

 

By the time John looks up, Merle has gone. 

 

 

\---

 

 

Merle is… Merle is confused, to say the least. Probably angry. Once he's left the cafe, he practically storms back home, filled with a nervous energy that is half rage and half something else. 

 

 

Why didn't John come and look for him? Did he not… trust him? Didn't he think that Merle would be safe? 

 

 

Merle goes to sleep that night with a question still burning in his heart. He had dropped Mavis and Mookie off at Hecuba’s earlier that day, so there wasn't even the patter of lively feet or the curious asking of questions to distract him. He was alone, but it was more than that. He was - as loathe as he was to admit it - lonely. 

 

 

\---

 

 

He wakes up early the next day, and leaves the house almost as soon as shops will be open. He starts asking around, if anyone has seen a tall handsome man, with dark hair, but more grey at the temples than the last time Merle saw him, wearing a suit. 

 

 

“Oh, you mean John? Yeah, he comes in here sometimes,” Merle heard from most of the people he asked. 

 

 

“I don't know where he normally hangs out, though,” was pretty much always the follow up. 

 

 

A few hours of searching turned into a day, and then one day turned into two, and then two days turned into - well, two days turned into calling Magnus on his stone of farspeech. 

 

 

He barely gives Magnus the time to greet him before he blurts out “John. He's back.” 

 

Magnus blinks in shock, though he knows Merle can't see. “What? When? Are you okay- is he dangerous?” 

 

 

“I don't know when, Maggie, but I saw him two days ago - I- I can't find him. I don't know where he is.” 

 

 

Magnus sighs. “Merle, if he's not- if he's not causing anyone harm, why do you want to find him so badly? Wouldn't it be safer to just- to just let him be?” 

 

 

There's a pause as Merle considers his next words (and chokes on them). “I miss him, Magnus,” he says after a while. “And I want to know he's okay.” 

 

Magnus pauses, thrown off guard by the unexpected honesty. His silence hangs heavy in the air for a couple of heartbeats, and then he says “And what if he doesn't want to be found?”

 

 

Merle hangs up. 

 

 

The next day, Merle keeps searching. 

 

 

He finds John on the fifth day, sat in the very same cafe as he was when Merle took the coward’s route and gave him that note. 

 

 

He walks over towards his table, a slight grin on his face. John is alive. He's sat at a table, drinking coffee, late afternoon sun streaming through the window and making him glow. He's beautiful, so fucking beautiful that it punches the air out of Merle's chest. 

 

 

And then John looks up. 

 

 

\---

 

 

“Hi, Merle,” he says, “Long time no see.”  

 

 

“Hiya, buddy.” 

 

 

“Please, take a seat.” 

 

 

Oh, yeah. He should do that. 

 

 

The silence grows more tense, more hollow as Merle sits opposite John. 

 

 

For the first time, neither of them really know what to say. 

 

 

A few seconds pass - seconds that, in the moment, feel like lifetimes - and John just says “So, Merle.” 

 

 

“So?” Merle responds with a quizzically lifted eyebrow. 

 

 

“So- I don't know Merle, why are you here? What do you want? Couldn't you have just left me alone? I'm not dangerous anymore.” His face falls with his last words, his shoulders hunching, pressing him smaller into his chair.

 

 

“I'm here because you are,” Merle says, “plain and simple. If you had been somewhere else, I would be searching for you there, instead of sitting here.” 

 

 

John's stiff-set jaw relaxes slightly, his eyes widening a barely-noticeable fraction, as if all of his previous conceptions of the world had just been brought down around him. He looks vulnerable. He looks - he looks weak.

 

 

“Why?” he asks, and Merle’s heart breaks. 

 

 

“Because-" 

 

Because you're important to me. 

 

Because I missed you. 

 

Because I needed to know you were okay. 

 

 

Because I love you.  

 

 

“Because - well, like I said; it's good to see you're safe, buddy. Where are you staying right now? I've got a spare room, if you want it.” 

 

 

Huh. He hadn't planned on offering that. 

 

 

John looks surprised, but pleasantly - not the hollow, shattered-earth expression that had graced his features mere moments ago. “I've been- yes, Merle. I would quite like that.”

 

 

The walk to Merle's estate was awkward, to say the least. John's tall, his stride long and graceful, and Merle struggles to keep up, at first. 

 

 

(John later slows down. He can't quite match Merle's pace, but it's a touching gesture nonetheless.) 

 

 

Neither of them speak until they arrive, when Merle makes a cursory comment of “Mind your head.” (He doesn't need to - the house was furnished with guests of many sizes in mind, and the doorframes are definitely high enough - but it gets a chuckle out of John's lips.) 

 

 

Merle offers to take John around the house - he accepts, but is apprehensive, to say the least. Merle has kids now, he remembers that much, at least. What if they're here - John doesn't even want to entertain the idea of having to deal with that. He never was any good around children, and he doesn't want to risk offending Merle. Ever. 

 

 

Merle's voice cuts through the clouds of anxiety starting to form in his mind. “You can have this room,” he says, seemingly unaware of John's stress. “I'm across the hall from you-" he points to another room, directly opposite John's - “And Mavis and Mookie’s rooms are down the hall, but they're at their mother’s till next weekend.” 

 

 

John breathes out, the sound harsh in the calm near-silence of Merle's home. 

 

 

“You okay, buddy?” Merle asks, a patient smile on his face. 

 

 

“Yes, it's just… a lot. But I'm fine.” 

 

 

As it turns out, John is not fine. He pretends to be, of course - he goes for walks with Merle, plays with Mookie, talks with Mavis (but not about her nightmares. Not about anything that's his fault.) 

 

 

The kids are only there every other weekend, which - as bad as it is sometimes for Merle - John is thankful for; as much as he enjoys seeing Merle with them, being a father (not necessarily the best one they could have, but the only one they've got), he doesn't have the energy to deal with them anymore often than that. 

 

 

He doesn't have the energy for a lot of things, these days. Merle tries to brush it off at first - being brought back from the dead has got tiring, after all; or maybe John just sleeps a lot - but it soon becomes apparent that it's more than that. It's more than tiredness, more than simply not having energy. If John had to describe it, he'd say it felt like he was being sapped. His soul - or what he thought remained of it (of course, a far different thought to what Merle’s would have been on the matter) - being pulled out of him, leaving him even more of a husk than before. Leaving him empty.

 

 

Drained. 

 

 

He doesn't talk about it - not to Taako when he starts visiting, apprehensive at first, but quickly becoming his jovial self when he sees that John isn't going to be hurting anyone any time soon, not to Magnus who shows up shortly after, and knows more about loss than any man his age should. 

 

 

(Because he saw the way their eyes widened when they saw him, heard the muffled sounds of people yelling over stones of farspeech after they left that first time.) 

 

 

Not to Merle, with his patient eyes and caring hands and a smile as old and kind as time itself. 

 

 

(Because he sees the way Merle cares for everyone, and he doesn't need to deal with any more problems.) 

 

 

Not to Merle, who has unwittingly given more of himself to John than to any other person before that, who always has a listening ear, or a joke, or the perfect tale from his adventures. 

 

 

(Because Mavis still wakes up screaming sometimes, and John sees the way she avoids looking at him in the mornings.) 

 

 

Not to Merle, who deserves far better than John could ever give. 

 

 

And so, John leaves. It's easy enough - all of his worthwhile possessions fit into a bag that is large, but not unmanageable. Everything else is Merle’s, really. Or it's theirs. John-and-Merle’s. Merle-and-John’s. 

 

 

It's heartbreaking, really, how much of himself he leaves behind. A tiny cactus, the only thing he'd ever kept alive for more than two weeks. A poem about an oh-so-familiar sunset, pinned to a corkboard. A worn-down patch on the armrest of a bench in the garden, where he would sit and write when everything was just too much. This is the summation of his time with Merle Highchurch, and it hurts that he can't take it with him, hurts in the centre of his chest, in the back of his head, in the pit of his stomach. 

 

 

But it doesn't hurt enough to make him stay. 

 

 

\---

 

John is gone. 

 

 

G. O. N. E. Gone. 

 

 

His bed has been made, the sheets tucked in crisply at the corners, the pillows plumped. There's a half-empty bottle of his cologne on the bedside table - Merle sprays it, once. It smells of sandalwood and vanilla, and it brings a hollowness to his chest and tears to his eyes. He doesn't let them fall, though - instead, he wipes them away roughly with the back of his hand, and calls Magnus. 

 

 

He picks up on the first ring. 

 

 

“Merle? Not like you to call; what's up?” 

 

 

“John-" He barely gets the word out before Magnus cuts him off. 

 

 

“What's he done? Are you okay?” 

 

 

“Yes. I'm fine,” he snaps. “John hasn't done anything, for Pan’s sake. He's not dangerous, we know this.” 

 

 

“So why…” 

 

 

This time, Merle cuts Magnus off. “He left. Last night. I don't know where, or why, or why he couldn't talk to me about it, but - but he's gone.”

 

 

Magnus pauses for a moment - Merle can almost hear the cogs spinning in his brain. “Do you want to ask Angus? He's smarter than the rest of us put together, even if you don't like him-" 

 

 

“It's been two years. He's been gone two years, Magnus, and I've had him back for less than a month and I miss him so badly it hurts.” Merle’s voice catches on the last word, cracking like ice in the centre of a lake, moments away from breaking under the weight of whoever's stood on it and plunging them into the icy depths below. “And I don't dislike Angus. He's just… well, I never was very good with kids, was I?” 

 

 

His words hang in the air for a beat, two, three, and then he speaks again. “But yes, get Angus. If any of us can find John, it'll be him.”  

 

 

“He can,” Magnus says, sure and steady as ever. 

 

 

A fortnight or so later, he is proven right. Angus shows up at Merle’s door, John in tow. He looks thinner, gaunt, almost. His dark skin is slightly ashen, his hair has even more grey in it than when he left, and his eyes look… well, they look dead. 

 

 

“Oh, John,” is all Merle can say. He pulls the taller man down into a hug, right there on the doorstep. John curls into Merle’s shoulder, gently trembling with fatigue. Eventually, Merle walks the two of them inside, and they sit down on the sofa. 

 

 

“When did you last eat?” Merle asks. 

 

 

“A few days ago,” is John’s reply, but it's more than that. He feels frail in Merle’s arms, like a bird. Like if Merle pushed too hard, he would break into a thousand tiny pieces. 

 

 

But still - Merle must push.

 

 

He works to get John out of the house, talking to people - invites him to go with him for the summer solstice celebration; goes with him to the opening of Taako’s restaurant; takes him to a spot on the beach that few people knew about, and even fewer visited, to watch the sun rise over the sea, turning the blue water into rippling golden glass. 

 

 

John watches the sunrise there a lot. It is beautiful, to put it in a way that can be understood. Beautiful in a way that he cannot say - how does one describe the sun? He can tell you how it looks, how golden light sets fire to the sea, how droplets thrown off the waves catch the light and glow like sparks, how it makes the sand shimmer - but that is not the sunrise. 

 

 

The sunrise is more than that - so much more. It is light and life and a new beginning. Watching it gives John hope. 

 

 

There are other things that give him hope, too. Watching the flowers in Merle’s garden bloom after winter; the smiles on kids’ faces after Merle’s Extreme Teen Adventures; even things as simple as the taste of good food and the feeling of camaraderie around the table when Taako invites them all round to eat. (John's still not sure how he ended up being invited to them, but he's not going to complain - it's like with Mavis and Mookie; after the initial oh-shit-you're-the hunger awkwardness, they managed to all get along quite well.) 

 

 

But there is a problem - all of this hope, all of this happiness? It hinges on Merle. John would have none of this without him; John wouldn't be were it not for Merle. 

 

 

And underneath everything - the neat hair, the charming smile, the cunning wit - John is terrified of losing it all again. Of losing his hope. 

 

 

So he kept quiet - about everything. About how Merle’s laugh made his heart jump, about how they knew exactly how the other took their tea, about how Merle could always calm him down from his (many, recurring) nightmares. About his feelings. 

 

 

About his love. 

 

 

John had been universes, had been everything and nothing all at once, had swallowed sunrises and sunsets and moons and stars, had absorbed all of creation into his being merely through the power of words, and here he was, too much of a coward to even think about telling Merle how he felt. 

 

 

He tries - oh, boy, he tries - but he never succeeds. It's just too much, too final. If you never say ‘I love you,’ you can never be rejected, he thinks. 

 

 

Which, of course, is mostly true. 

 

 

(But also, if you never say ‘I love you,’ you may never hear it in return.)

 

 

John sits with those words on his tongue for months. The anniversary of his return comes and passes, and he doesn't say it. Merle’s next birthday, where John takes him breakfast in bed with a perfectly made pot of tea, and then they go to the beach to watch the sun set again, happens, and still those words never cross John's lips. 

 

 

They cross Merle’s, though, in the forms of “are you okay?” and “do you want some tea?” and “how's your book?”

 

 

(And in the form of him holding John's shaking form when nightmares and guilt wake him in the night, of him painstakingly caring for him when he comes down with the flu, of John's sheets going unused for months because he sleeps better when he isn't alone.) 

 

 

Everything he does translates into love. His care, his worry, his little check-ins. He loves fiercely, and without reserve. 

 

 

It's a wonder it takes the two of them so long to put it all together. 

 

 

But they do put it together, eventually. Five years after the day of Story and Song, almost three years after John's return, (three years of pining, of maybes, of drunken confessions to everyone but the other) the two of them are sat together, on a beach, watching the sun set over the horizon. It's eerily reminiscent of another, far more heartbreaking night, five years ago. 

 

 

But this time, as the sun disappears, and the sky turns inky black, and the glowing moon rises into the sky, John doesn't disappear. 

 

 

He isn't gone.

 

 

Merle reaches a hand over to him, almost subconsciously, just - just to check that he is really still there. John takes his hand. 

 

 

And neither of them let go. 

 

 

And… well. 

 

 

And they keep on… not letting go. 

 

 

When the sun rises the next morning, the day goes exactly the same. Merle wakes up before John, tries to get out of bed without waking him - which he fails at, but John lets him think he succeeded - waters his plants, and makes breakfast for John and himself. This time, though, when he takes it back into the room that has been ‘theirs’ for months, but is now theirs, and they sit together on the bed to eat it, their sides are pressed together - not a single moment passes without them touching. This time, when they finish eating, Merle puts the plates to the side, and pulls John down into a soft, tender kiss, the kind that makes your head spin and your eyes flutter and tilts the world on its axis. 

 

 

And they then spend three hours in the shower - it's a really good thing that Hecuba’s got the kids for the week. 

**Author's Note:**

> Comments and kudos literally preserve me thank you. Hmu on tumblr + Twitter @dansnotavampire to scream. In general. Also about these old gay dudes


End file.
